The retirement of FASB's long-serving chairman is no surprise. Eight years is a long time at the helm, especially when the last two involved a serious banking crisis in which accounting was a central concern. But Bob Herz kept a stiff upper lip and gave little quarter, even when playing defense and compromising where he had to.

When I interviewed Herz's predecessor, Ed Jenkins, he had clearly been through the ringer on everything from derivatives accounting to Enron. And it showed.

I see that FASB is sticking to its schedule for ending most off-balance-sheet treatment for leases, and so is the IASB. It's about time, frankly, if only to spare us poor, I mean, intrepid financial journalists from having to sort through the particulars of the current accounting treatment a moment longer than necessary.

I speak from personal experience here, having wrestled with the false distinction between capital and operating leases for a sidebar to a piece I wrote for CFO Magazine way back when. The article delved into the details of a particularly complex variation that companies were using to finance real estate, called synthetic leases.

 Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

 Just last week we mentioned the American Bankers Association and its efforts to undermine the FASB's latest fair value proposal that, in the ABA's mind, could bring down civilization as we know it.

Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

Banks hate the FASB. This is understood. They're especially bent out of shape these days because the Board recently put out its latest fair value proposal that requires them to carry their loans at fair value. Bob Herz knew that this was going to cause hella-belly aching although he may not have predicted the virtual assault that was coming.

Submitted by Adrienne Gonzalez, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

If we still care about financial reform, we should especially care about proposed changes to the Government Accounting Standards Board because, let's face it, government accounting could really use a helping hand. Were government pensions forced to use the same reporting rules as every other pension, a $3 trillion hole would open up and we would see immediately that rules in desperate need of repair have remained broken because the current system allows the truth to be buried in the footnotes.

The latest revelations  concerning the dispute between AIG and Goldman over collateral show how weak the new financial reform package really is.

After all, Goldman's demands for collateral from AIG as it was failing ended up costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Yet according to the testimony today during the crisis panel's latest hearings, the whole question hinged on what constituted fair value.

Submitted by Caleb Newquist,  republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

Yesterday we briefly picked up the Overstock beat as Sam Antar pointed out that everyone's favorite Salt Lake City resident got a little confused about when they knew their gain contingency existed that resulted in some contradictory disclosures.

Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

KPMG has been kicked to the curb by Enterprise Financial according to an 8-K that was filed on Friday by the company. The ubiquitous claim of "no disagreements with [insert firm]" was there along with a mention of a material weakness that was related to the restatements issued for both 2008 and 2007 but that couldn't possibly have anything to do with the dismissal of the auditors:

Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

Earlier in the week we heard the devastating news that the FASB and IASB's convergence efforts, despite a good hustle, would not meet the G20's deadline of June 2011.

I have to say that today's House Financial Services Committee hearing into Lehman Brothers' collapse leaves me confused in more than one respect.

Ben Bernanke told the committee that regulatory authority over Lehman rested with the Securities and Exchange Commission under a voluntary program set up in 2004.